Tools

I haven’t blogged in a while -mostly due to lack of time, as usual- but I thought I’d write something today to let the world know about one of the things I’ve worked on a bit during this week, while remotely attending the Web Engines Hackfest from home: Setting up an environment for cross-compiling WebKit2GTK+ for ARM I know this is not new, nor ground-breaking news, but the truth is that I could not find any up-to-date documentation on the topic in a any public forum (the only one I found was this pretty old post from the time WebKitGTK+ used autotools), so I thought I would devote some time to it now, so that I could save more in the future. Of course, I know for a fact that many people use local recipes to cross-compile WebKit2GTK+ for ARM (or simply build in the target machine, which usually takes a looong time), but those are usually ad-hoc things and hard to reproduce environments locally (or at least hard for me) and, even worse, often bound to downstream projects, so I thought it would be nice to try to have something tested with upstream WebKit2GTK+ and publish it on trac.webkit.org, ...

First of all, let me be clear: no, I’m not trying to leave Emacs again, already got over that stage. Emacs is and will be my main editor for the foreseeable future, as it’s clear to me that there’s no other editor I feel more comfortable with, which is why I spent some time cleaning up my .emacs.d and making it more “manageable”. But as much as like Emacs as my main “weapon”, I sometimes appreciate the advantages of using a different kind of beast for specific purposes. And, believe me or not, in the past 2 years I learned to love Eclipse/CDT as the best work-mate I know when I need some extra help to get deep inside of the two monster C++ projects that WebKit and Chromium are. And yes, I know Eclipse is resource hungry, slow, bloated… and whatnot; but I’m lucky enough to have fast SSDs and lots of RAM in my laptop & desktop machines, so that’s not really a big concern anymore for me (even though I reckon that indexing chromium in the laptop takes “quite some time”), so let’s move on :-) ...

I have a chrooted environment in my 64bit Fedora 22 machine that I use every now and then to work on a debian-like 32bit system where I might want to do all sorts of things, such as building software for the target system or creating debian packages. More specifically, today I was trying to build WebKitGTK+ 2.8.3 in there and something weird was happening: The following CMake snippet was not properly recognizing my 32bit chroot: ...

As a long time Thinkpad’s trackpoint user and owner of a Lenovo T440s, I always felt quite frustrated with the clickpad featured in this laptop, since it basically ditched away all the physical buttons I got so used to, and replace them all with a giant, weird and noisy “clickpad”. Fortunately, following Peter Hutterer’s post on X.Org Synaptics support for the T440, I managed to get a semi-decent configuration where I basically disabled any movement in the touchpad and used it three giant soft buttons. It certainly took quite some time to get used to it and avoid making too many mistakes but it was at least usable thanks to that. ...

It’s been 7 years already since I started using Emacs and, for some reason, I still haven’t found a text editor I do feel more comfortable with, and I Swear to Gods I’ve tried. I really did. And as proof, I can tell that those who know me a bit can really support this statement, no doubt about it. The thing is that, for some reason or another, whenever I tried a different editor, a fancy IDE or anything else, the result was always the same: I first realize of a new and very interesting feature X in the editor Y which makes me think for a while “hmmm… this could be the one”, then I start using that editor Y for a while, then I realize I’m not comfortable enough for many other things, then I realize I’m continuously alternating between that editor and Emacs and then… finally… I somehow manage to “port” that very nice feature X to Emacs and ditch editor Y to finally come back to the origin again. ...